Concept and Design of a Learning/Teaching Component for Disease Specialists Agents in a Holonic Medical Diagnostic System

Abstract

At the
University Duisburg-Essen, a holonic medical diagnostic system based on
multi-agents technology and swarm
intelligence is developed through the last years.The system
combines the advantages of the holonic paradigm, multi-agent technologies and
swarm intelligence in building a highly adaptive, scalable, flexible, reliable
and robust Internet-based medical diagnostic system.The medical
diagnostic system is compound of three type of agents: a mediator agent, many
diagnosis specialist agents and disease representative agents.The mediator
agent represents the diagnostic system interface to the diagnosis requester and
to the physician/specialist evaluator. Several diagnosis specialist agents are
becoming part of the ad-hoc holonic structure in order to provide a suitable
diagnostic. The disease representative agents are related to each defined
disease that can be a diagnosis result. A disease representative agent
determines if a set of symptoms matches its own symptom pattern. In diagnosis
retrieval process, the agents follow a specific swarm intelligence method to
build a holonic structure that provides one or more possible diagnostics. Each
diagnostic returned by the system has a probability to match the true
diagnostic that, in common way, is determined by the physician. The diagnosis
specialist agent of a certain level is forwarding the symptoms description data
as computer readable patient pattern to other diagnosis specialist agents of a
lower level in order to receive from them later on a diagnostic that can
satisfy the symptoms constraints. Any
diagnosis specialist agent encapsulates a learning/teaching component
and a disease specific component that are determining the agent capability to
adapt or to adopt a new disease as representative.This thesis has
to contribute to the diagnosis specialist agent development by introducing the
design and implementation of a learning/teaching component and of a disease
specific module required by such an agent.The following
milestones have to be reached by the thesis:1. Realization of a Learning
Component for acquiring of new disease data from another agent or from a
special system;2. Realization of a Teaching
Component for publishing of description data for actual disease that the
diagnosis specialist agent contains.3. Implementation of a Disease
Specific Component to operate with standard format of the disease data and with
operations that the disease specialist agent can perform on that data;
standardization of the disease data has to be handled;

For
implementation, one of the most common object oriented programming
languages, Java and C++ have to be
used.